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The average Web site conversion rate is a little more than 2 percent. In other words, nearly all of the people who visit a site for the first time leave without some form of desired action.

That's why many brands have turned to retargeting, which focuses on getting those previous visitors back to your site. Retargeting can be accomplished via display ads, search, e-mail, and now social media, as well as via Facebook's FBX ad exchange and Twitter's new retargeting option.

According to research we've found from around the Web, there's no question about it: Retargeted ads can influence conversion.

1. In a study that evaluated various strategies in terms of the average lift in search activity generated for an advertised brand, retargeting represented the highest lift in trademark search behavior at 1,046 percent.

2. Nearly three out of five U.S. online buyers said they notice ads for products they looked up on other sites.

3. Thirty percent of consumers have a positive or very positive reaction to retargeted ads, vs. 11 percent who feel negatively about them. The greatest percentage, though—59 percent—had a neutral reaction.

5. Among primary site retargeting goals are increasing brand revenue and acquiring new customers (at 33 percent each), with additional focus on increasing both site engagement (16 percent) and increasing brand awareness (12 percent). Significantly, marketers are more likely (+15 percentage points) to use site retargeting to acquire customers.

8. E-mail retargeting CTRs and conversion rates are anywhere from 3 to 5 percent higher with upsells, as compared to standard site retargeting.

9. Online consumers are open to receiving behaviorally retargeting ads. While the majority of consumers (60 percent) remain neutral about the topic of retargeting ads, 25 percent enjoy them because they remind them of what they were looking at previously.

10. Being drawn to products in advertisements is the most commonly noted reason consumers gave for clicking on a retargeted ad (37 percent). Consumers also said retargeted ads are a convenient way to visit a Web site users already intended to visit (28 percent) and for desiring more information on the product in the ad (21 percent).

11. CPG company Kimberly-Clark relies on retargeting, saying it is seeing 50 to 60 percent higher conversion rates among consumers who have been retargeted.

12. The average click-through rate for display ads is 0.07 percent, and the average click-through for retargeted ads is about 0.7 percent.

13. Web site visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70 percent more likely to convert on your Web site.

14. When looking at more than 1 billion impressions from 547 advertisers running retargeting campaigns on FBX's right-hand side, FBX News Feed, and standard Web retargeting, after just one month FBX News Feed accounted for 15 percent of clicks, despite having just 0.5 percent of the total ad impressions.